Gender Differences in Politeness Strategies in Negotiations in Sharktank America and Sharktank Vietnam: A Contrastive Analysis

Abstract

Gender and language have long been an interesting field in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. In the current study, politeness - one of the core issues of modern pragmatics, is adapted to hopefully shed great light on the issue in Vietnamese and American contexts to explore the gender differences in negotiations. Employing descriptive, qualitative, and quantitative methods, the data recorded from 10 conversations in Shark Tank Vietnam Season 3 TV program and 1tenconversations in Shark Tank America were transcribed and analyzed to reveal the different strategies based on Brown and Levinson's theory (1987) used by gender group of Sharks (investors). The gender linguistic differences under the contrastive analysis theory feature the prominent politeness strategies used by investors in American and Vietnamese negotiations. Those are very significant to support the evaluation of language and gender in the current society and in a cross-culture context.